Looks like iPad Mini in short supply

Apple's iPad Mini will now take about two weeks to ship to customers who order it from the company's online store, suggesting the product may be temporarily sold out.Models with Wi-Fi only are available to ship in two weeks, while versions with wireless-network connections will be sent to customers in mid-November, according to delivery information on Apple's website. When it introduced the iPad Mini on Oct. 23, Apple said that Wi-Fi only models would be available by Friday, with wireless versions shipping a couple of weeks later.The 7.9-inch iPad Mini, which costs $329 to $659, is entering a tablet market crowded with cheaper alternatives from Amazon.com, Google and Samsung. The backlog suggests Apple will continue to dominate the market, and may sell 101.6 million iPads in 2013, said Michael Walkley, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity.
PayPal will cut 325 jobs and take a pretax restructuring charge of $15 million, part of President David Marcus' efforts to streamline the eBay payment division and accelerate new products.Could You Start Your Car With D-Cell Batteries?PayPal is also ending work arrangements with about 120 contractors worldwide, San Jose's eBay said Monday.Marcus is overhauling the payment unit, whose almost 13,000 employees are competing with startups such as Stripe and WePay that have been able to roll out services more efficiently. Marcus, who took over in April, so far has consolidated nine product groups into one and announced a plan to reorganize offices into a more collaborative environment.PayPal accounted for 43 percent of eBay's revenue last year, compared with 25 percent in 2007. While sales rose 23 percent to $1.37 billion in the third quarter, that gain was less than the 32 percent jump to $1.11 billion during the same three months in 2011.
Facebook has been sued by Kickflip, which does business as Gambit, over claims the Menlo Park social-networking company broke antitrust laws in the virtual-currency market.Gambit was the leading virtual currency and payment-processing provider to software developers that published games on Facebook and other social networks. Facebook's decision in 2009 to offer its own services to developers destroyed a "vibrant and competitive market," lawyers for Kickflip said in court papers made public Monday in federal court in Wilmington, Del."Facebook leveraged its dominance in the social-game marketplace to control and dominate the separate market for virtual-currency services," Kickflip lawyers said. "As the result of Facebook's actions, Gambit's business was destroyed."

Could You Start Your Car With D-Cell Batteries?

I seem to recall a question like this in an introductory physics textbook. The basic idea was that your car has a 12-volt battery that is used to start the engine, right? Well, 8 D-Cell batteries in series will also make a 12-volt battery. However, not all 12-volt batteries are the same. The D-cells just won't do the job of starting your car.The problem is that as you increase the current out of a battery, the voltage across this battery does not stay constant but instead decreases. For example, take a D-cell and connect the negative and positive terminals with a plain copper wire. This wire has a ridiculously low resistance. Suppose the wire had a resistance of just 1 Ω, With a 1.5 volt potential difference, you would have 1.5 amps of current going through this wire. That's pretty high for a single D-cell battery.Then how can we model the actual voltage across a battery? The key is to model the battery as a constant change in potential along with a built in resistor in series with this. Here is my diagram of a D-cell battery.
This also shows why your D-cell won't start a car. Suppose you need 200 amps going to the starter motor for it to function correctly. Even if the internal resistance is just 1 Ω, that would be a 200-volt drop inside the battery. Of course, that is larger voltage drop than the internal battery itself. Bummer.There is a way to get 200 amps out of a D-cell – have a whole bunch of D-cells in parallel. Lets say I have 200 sets of 8 D-cells in parallel. In that case, each D-cell would only need to produce 1 amp of current. With them all together, this would be 200 amps.There are a couple of ways to determine the internal resistance of a battery. It is easy to determine the "internal" voltage. All you need to do is measure the voltage across the battery while it has no load (not connected to anything). Next, hook the battery up to some low (but known) resistance. Like this.Just a check. This does have the correct units. Also, if the battery has a really low internal resistance, the voltage across the battery will be about the same as the "internal" voltage. This is essentially what this equation says.The only thing is that to use this method, you need to know the resistance value of the load you put on the battery. There is another way.What if I measure the current and the voltage across the battery for a variety of resistance loads? In this, case, I would expect the following relationship.From this, I can plot the voltage across the battery as a function of the current coming out of the battery. This way I can put whatever resistors I like for a load and it just doesn't even matter what these values are. The nice thing about this other method is that it uses more data points and ignores the resistance. If I take a 10Ω resistor and hook it up to a battery, it might not actually be 10Ω. Resistors don't always have a constant resistance.

A month with the iPhone 5

Record-breaking preorders. Anticipation. Lines that begin forming a week in advance. Excitement. Launch-day lines that extend for blocks. Chaos. Supply shortages. Heartbreak. Preorder delays. Panic. Record-breaking opening weekend sales. Doubt. Problems that begin to arise. Scandals. Troubles continue to mount. Apologies. Heavy demand persists… These are the makings of an Apple (AAPL) device launch.When Apple released its third-generation iPad earlier this year, it seemed like the hype surrounding Apple launches might finally be subsiding. Lines were short, inventory was plentiful and some were left wondering if Apple fever had subsided. As it turned out, that was not the case at all. The company's manufacturing partner had finally managed to build enough devices to satisfy demand while Apple encouraged customers to preorder online rather than making in-store purchases on launch day.Electric Car Battery Maker A123 Expects Debt Default.Apple ended up selling 3 million iPads during the device's debut weekend, making it the company's second-biggest launch of all time behind the iPhone 4S.
But Apple was back to its old self last month when the iPhone 5 finally hit store shelves (albeit briefly). The phone that took less than an hour to sell out on Apple.com was also sold out at many Apple Stores and carrier stores across the country after just a few hours, and it remains extremely difficult to find a new iPhone more than a month later.Demand for a fresh new design had been building ahead of Apple's iPhone 4S unveiling last year and when the company pulled back the curtain on a smartphone that looked exactly like its predecessor, people were disappointed. They got over it quickly, of course, and the 4S went on to become the fastest-selling smartphone of all time. Even still, people wanted a "new" iPhone.I have spent the past month using Apple's new iPhone 5 alongside various other devices that have launched recently, and I've measured it against the competition as well as its predecessors. The device is certainly not without its faults — "Scuffgate" and "Mapsgate" have shown us that — but is the new iPhone 5 really "the biggest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone," as Apple claims?
I have owned each generation of iPhone, from the original model through to the current version. From a design and materials perspective, the original iPhone was always my favorite. I was not happy when Apple moved away from aluminum and opted for plastic on the iPhone 3G and 3GS, and while the iPhone 4 and 4S moved back in the right direction by dumping cheap-feeling plastics in favor of glass and metal, I still missed the sleek aluminum housing on the first iPhone.

Lab tests: Why Consumer Reports can't recommend the iPhone 4

This just hit my inbox from Consumer Reports so I thought I'd share it with you: "Consumer Reports engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4 and have confirmed that a hardware flaw creating the reception problem.  As a result, Consumer Reports has decided not to recommend the iPhone 4."It's official. Consumer Reports' engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception. When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone's lower left side—an easy thing, especially for lefties—the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you're in an area with a weak signal. Due to this problem, we can't recommend the iPhone 4.
We reached this conclusion after testing all three of our iPhone 4s (purchased at three separate retailers in the New York area) in the controlled environment of CU's radio frequency (RF) isolation chamber. In this room, which is impervious to outside radio signals, our test engineers connected the phones to our base-station emulator, a device that simulates carrier cell towers. We also tested several other AT&T phones the same way, including the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre. None of those phones had the signal-loss problems of the iPhone 4.Our findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4′s signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that "mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength."
The tests also indicate that AT&T's network might not be the primary suspect in the iPhone 4′s much-reported signal woes.We did, however, find an affordable solution for suffering iPhone 4 users: Cover the antenna gap with a piece of duct tape or another thick, non-conductive material. It may not be pretty, but it works. We also expect that using a case would remedy the problem. We'll test a few cases this week and report back.The signal problem is the reason that we did not cite the iPhone 4 as a "recommended" model, even though its score in our other tests placed it atop the latest Ratings of smart phones that were released today.The iPhone scored high, in part because it sports the sharpest display and best video camera we've seen on any phone, and even outshines its high-scoring predecessors with improved battery life and such new features as a front-facing camera for video chats and a built-in gyroscope that turns the phone into a super-responsive game controller. But Apple needs to come up with a permanent—and free—fix for the antenna problem before we can recommend the iPhone 4.

Electric Car Battery Maker A123 Expects Debt Default

The Company expects to be in default under certain of its material debt agreements. The Company does not expect to timely pay the October Interest Payment due today, October 15, 2012, under the 2016 Notes which non-payment will result in a default under the indenture governing the 2016 Notes, $143,750,000 in aggregate principal amount of which are currently outstanding. Similarly, the Company does not intend to timely pay a 6% P&I Payment due today, October 15, 2012, under the 6% Notes, $2,759,118.69 in aggregate principal amount of which are currently outstanding, which non-payment will result in an event of default under the 6% Notes and will permit the holders of the 6% Notes to require them to be redeemed.  The failure to pay the October Interest Payment and the 6% P&I Payment will also result in events of default under the Loan Agreement, but those events of default are temporarily waived under the First Loan Consent and Waiver Agreement and Second Loan Consent and Waiver Agreement, respectively, as described in Item 1.01 of this Current Report on Form 8-K.
The Company is considering a broad set of strategic alternatives to address its liquidity constraints including one or more potential transactions and is preparing for all contingencies as part of that process.Out of Print's iPad Case – Manufactured by a Real Bookbinder.However, there is no assurance that the Company will be able to pursue a strategic alternative that will allow it to continue to operate its business as a going concern. The Company may not have sufficient cash to fund operations and may need to seek the protections provided under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code to, among other things, obtain access to new financing and facilitate one or more of the transactions it is contemplating. No assurance can be given that the Company will be able to avoid restructuring, reorganization, or a bankruptcy filing.
Hoping to kick-start an electric-vehicle battery industry, the U.S. provided $1.26 billion since 2009 to battery makers including Johnson Controls Inc, JCI +0.50% LG Chem Ltd. 051910.SE 0.00%, and Dow Koka DOW +0.85%m, a joint venture of Dow Chemical Co. and South Korea’s Kokam Co., to set up nine factories in four U.S. states. Most are producing far fewer batteries than originally expected. Ener1 Inc., another government-grant recipient, sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructuring and has since emerged.A123 was awarded $249 million in Department of Energy grants and has used about half so far to pay for some of the costs of building a factory in Livonia, Mich. It was among the earliest entrants in the field, opening its Michigan battery plant in 2010, and outlining plans for a second U.S. facility.

Out of Print's iPad Case – Manufactured by a Real Bookbinder

Right on the heels of GeekMom Kris's review of indie company Out of Print's products, we had an invitation to be among the first to check out a sample of their eReader/tablet case!This made the rounds this past summer as an immensely popular Kickstarter campaign and the necessary funds (and then some!) were raised in just over a week.Out of Print contacted the country's oldest bookbinder about keeping alive a classic trade with a modern twist. These are authentic hand-assembled cloth-bound covers with a molded styrene plastic pop-in holder for the iPad.I had just received a new iPad for my birthday in September and was happy to be able to review this product just a couple weeks later. I had requested The Great Gatsby as my cover of choice; the classic cover brings back memories of the copies of the books we had in the 9th grade for English class required reading.
Out of Print has a mission of spreading its love of classic literature and it donates books for every product sold through the Books for Africa. As we recently discussed here, anything sold to Americans that's made in America is appealing also.This iPad case would be a great gift this holiday season. It's a fun way to dress up your iPad (or other eReader or tablet device) and keep those around you guessing.It's incredibly simple to put the iPad into the case. The molded plastic was designed by an MIT Engineer and he did a great job — it fit my device perfectly.  It snaps into place and so far has not given me any problems. There are spaces cut into the sides of the moulding to accomodate the volume controls/mute switch, power switch, charging port and headphone jack. A hole is cut into the upper left corner of the back of the cover to accomodate the camera lens (see top photo above). There is even space carved out underneath the speaker to prevent the sound from muffling. The edges of the plastic moulding have grooves cut into the sides to give the appearance of page edges.  Clever design.
This case will truly make your eReader or iPad look like a book. You could sit this down next to you and no one would know the difference! It could be sitting in the passenger seat of your car and someone wouldn't think to break in and steal your device.Despite the fantastic attention to detail in the design, and the "fun" factor in this product overall, there are some features that could use improvement or are missing. Some of these features are unique to the iPad and may not be a factor with the other models for which Out of Print will make these covers. If you're considering these cases for eReader purposes only, then you might find this list superfluous.

Lawyer in prostitution case: protection order 'draconian'

The lawyer for a Thomaston man charged in connection with a Kennebunk prostitution investigation is opposing the state's motion for a protection order, calling the proposed order "draconian," "overly protective," and "unwarranted and unprecedented."The state's motion for a protective order would effectively seal indefinitely all records in the case against Strong, which includes an alleged list of more than 100 clients.Daniel Lilley, representing Mark Strong Sr., 57, of Thomaston, filed his opposition to the state's motion for a protective order in York County Superior Court on Sept. 27. The motion was entered into the court file Monday.
"In its proposed protective order, the State is requesting, in essence, an absolute and unconditional gag order in this case," Lilley states in a letter addressing his opposition. "The State has provided absolutely no compelling reason why such a draconian order is warranted in this single-count misdemeanor case."Strong was charged in July with promoting prostitution. His charge followed a police investigation and search of the Pura Vida Studio on Route 1 and a nearby office space in Kennebunk, as well as the Wells home of Alexis Wright, who operated the businesses.Zaggsparq Charger Batteries For iPhone, iPad, iAnything.Wright has not been charged.
The York County Coast Star and the Portland Press Herald on Friday jointly filed an objection to the state's proposed protection order, objecting to both the scope of the proposed order as well as the reasons given for it."The State has not explained why the alternatives to closure, including jury selection, jury instructions, sequestration, and (if necessary) change of venue are inadequate to ensure a fair trial. In addition, the defendant opposes confidentiality," said attorney Sigmund Schutz of the Portland firm Preti Flaherty, who filed a letter objecting to the state's motion on the newspapers' behalf. "The State has not explained what particular information raises privacy concerns or how such concerns outweigh the public interest in open criminal proceedings.""As journalists we take very seriously our role in championing the public's right to have access to legal proceedings and court documents," said Coast Star Editor Laura Dolce. "This case has generated huge interest in the region, yet much of the investigation and nearly all of the materials related to it have been kept under a cloak of secrecy for months now. We felt it was time to make our objections known."